Tales of love and romance and a broken heart, anyone? Move over Marguerite Duras, move of Charlotte Brontë, move over Boris Pasternak, move over Nicholas Sparks, here comes Barry Yourgrau.
Like most everyone else, I've read the classics, such works as Jane Eyre, Doctor Zhivago and The Lover, but, for me, what Barry has captured in his short tale of the after effects of amour is unsurpassed. Here's how the story begins:
AT THE CLOCKMAKER'S
After the procedure, I convaesce in a little corner room of planked walls crowded under the eaves. It's not exactly commodious, but fresh air and warmth enter through the bright, parted curtains of the window, and at day's end, the clockmaker's wife comes to wheel me out onto the porch. I sit with the tartan blanket over my lap, in the company of the other customer here. The lake shines below us through the creaking poles of the pine trees, and the ducks slowly lift their kite-tail colonies into the air and start their beat across our panorama. The air smells of resin in a softly bracing way.
My companion-in-repair and I exchange our customary daily inquires and reports. We're casualties of romance, the two of us, and of a very particular breed: our hearts, it turns out, are cockoo clocks. That's the kind of guys we are, and we've come here into the pine woods to have things mended. in my case, the clockmaker has had to completely remove the antique, handcarved resident robin, so badly mangled was it in the disaster of a love affair. Its replacement alas resembles more a chickadee, and it doesn't pop from its walnut-wood hatch with quite the zing of the former much-beloved model. I'm staying on these several days more while the clockmaker continues to tinker, as he does with my colleague, whose splendid minideer antlers snapped in several places when he caught his wife cheating, for the third time. Then his spring mechanism succumbed to inner rust, and his minute hand simply stopped.
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